The soybean planting season begins soon in the US – but fertiliser production has been seriously disrupted by the conflict around Iran, and especially the Straits of Hormuz. CC-licensed photo by United Soybean Board on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Half-full? Perhaps? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
The nitrogen trap • Shanaka Anslem Perera
Shanaka Anslem Perera:
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No country appears to maintain a fertilizer reserve system remotely comparable in scale, doctrine, or strategic importance to the petroleum reserve architecture built after the oil shocks of the 1970s. Today’s policy response to the Hormuz crisis is not a nutrient reserve release. It is an improvised attempt to rebuild shipping and insurance capacity on the fly. This structural asymmetry, now exposed with violent clarity, may prove to be one of the most consequential oversights in the history of modern statecraft.
The Strait of Hormuz, a 21-nautical-mile corridor of shallow water between Iran and Oman, does not merely carry 20% of the world’s oil. It carries a significant share of the molecular foundation underlying half the planet’s food supply. UNCTAD estimates that roughly one-third of global seaborne fertilizer trade passes through Hormuz. The Fertilizer Institute separately estimates that exporters exposed directly or indirectly to the conflict account for nearly 49% of global urea exports, nearly 30% of global ammonia exports, and nearly half of global sulphur trade.
That combination makes Hormuz not merely an energy chokepoint, but one of the most concentrated nutrient chokepoints in the global food system. Since late February 2026, commercial traffic through that corridor has effectively collapsed. UNCTAD reports daily ship transits fell by approximately 97%. As of mid-March, neither belligerent has shown willingness to negotiate. Trump rejected allied efforts to launch ceasefire talks on March 14. Iran’s foreign minister stated on March 15: “We never asked for a ceasefire.”
And the spring planting clock is ticking toward a deadline that no diplomatic breakthrough can extend, because seeds do not negotiate, soil chemistry does not pause for geopolitics, and the quadratic yield response curve of cereal crops does not bend to the will of men who have never planted a field.
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Perera argues, in depth, that the events of the past few weeks have very serious implications for food planting that would affect millions of people around the world. This and the next couple of links aren’t comfortable reading. But we’re in just about the worst possible situation, short of someone dropping a nuclear bomb on the Qatar/Iran gas field.
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Long-haul Easter flights at risk due to fuel rationing • The Times
Oliver Wright and Ben Clatworthy:
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Airlines have been warned that they will face jet fuel shortages as soon as next month, risking flight cancellations to long-haul destinations at the end of the busy Easter holiday period.
Oil traders expect to see shortages of jet fuel from the continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz within the coming weeks as reserve supplies are run down and not replaced.
This week, Vietnam became the first country to warn of possible flight cancellations from April after China and Thailand announced they were halting exports of fuel to maintain their own supplies.
Other countries are expected to follow suit in the coming days with industry experts warning that airlines could be forced to stop serving some long-haul destinations because they may not be able to get the fuel for the return journey.
Britain is also vulnerable to potential disruption if the conflict continues as the majority of the country’s imported jet fuel comes from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The UK only has the domestic refining capacity to meet a third of current demand, according to the government’s most recent security of supply report.
The price of jet fuel in Europe hit a record high on Tuesday. Prices are almost double what they were before the conflict started. The cost of jet fuel has risen substantially more than the cost of crude oil given the reliance on the region for exports.
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I hate to be the bearer of bad news… • Thread Reader App
Arnaud Bertrand:
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I hate to be the bearer of bad news but if infrastructure like this 👇 gets blown up, as of this moment it will take at least a decade to recover from this war – and the truth is that the world’s energy picture is probably changed forever.
This single facility produced roughly 20% of global LNG [liquefied natural gas] supply and, as of 2011, had taken $70bn to build.
What makes this even worse is that Iran’s strike on this was retaliation after Israel attacked their South Pars gas field which draws from the same natural gas reservoir, which is the world’s largest by far (9,700 km² – about the size of Qatar itself).
Heck, on the list of the 25 largest natural gas fields this single reservoir holds roughly 40% of their combined recoverable reserves – and is nearly six times bigger than the second biggest field in the world. And, unlike many of the others on the list, it’s only at 10% depletion (meaning 90% of the gas is still there).
Which means that, probably for many years, a huge share of the gas from the world’s largest reservoir simply won’t be extractable, as infrastructure on both sides – Qatar’s and Iran’s – has now been blown up.
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There’s a lot more to this – it’s a long thread of tweets, but none of them is good. What’s going on in the Middle East is extremely dangerous for the entire world economy.
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The 49MB webpage • thatshubham
Shubham Bose:
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If active distraction of readers of your own website was an Olympic Sport, news publications would top the charts every time.
I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.
It is the same story across top publishers today.
To truly wrap your head around the phenomenon of a 49MB web page, let’s quickly travel back a few decades. With this page load, you would be leaping ahead of the size of Windows 95 (28 floppy disks). The OS that ran the world fits perfectly inside a single modern page load. In 2006, the iPod reigned supreme and digital music was precious. A standard high-quality MP3 song at 192 kbps bitrate took up around 4 to 5 MB.
This singular page represents roughly 10 to 12 full-length songs. I essentially downloaded an entire album’s worth of data just to read a few paragraphs of text. According to the International Telecommunication Union, the global average broadband internet speed back then was about 1.5Mbps. Your browser would continue loading this monstrosity for several minutes, enough time for you to walk away and make a cup of coffee.
If hardware has improved so much over the past 20 years, has the modern framework/ad-tech stack completely negated that progress with abstraction and poorly architected bloat?
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Bose points to The Guardian and The New York Times, but many people can think of far worse publishers. He’s right, though: many web news publications have become user-hostile, which is one reason why places like Substack – no adverts! No autoplay videos! – are so attractive to so many readers.
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Government to lift paywall from large parts of the Land Registry • The Guardian
Fiona Harvey:
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Finding out who owns land in England is to become much simpler because a paywall will be lifted from large parts of the Land Registry, the government is to announce.
A small number of landowners control the majority of land but finding out who owns what is difficult to piece together, even for government departments, owing to the way the Land Registry operates. Freeing up access will make it easier to determine ownership of key areas, such as river catchments, grouse moors and peatland.
The change comes as part of a major reform to the way England’s land is managed. The government’s long-awaited land use framework – to be unveiled by Emma Reynolds, the environment secretary, on Wednesday afternoon – marks the first time that government has attempted to assess how best to use farmland, nature reserves and areas of degraded land to help balance competing needs for land for food production, housing, energy and industry.
For the first time, ministers will set out how much land is needed to meet the UK’s net zero target through growing forests and restoring peatland as “carbon sinks” and through energy generation from solar and windfarms. Only about 1% of land will be needed for renewable energy generation, according to the government’s new estimate, and much of the land required will still be used for food production, for instance through livestock grazing around windfarms and under solar panels.
New mapping will also make it easier to assess how the restoration of peatlands in upland areas could reduce flooding from rivers, which is expected to worsen as the climate crisis deepens.
Reynolds said: “It is more important than ever that we make the right decisions about our finite land, especially in the face of the dual threat of the climate and nature crises. The land use framework will hardwire climate resilience and nature-based solutions into our decision-making to ensure that we have safe homes for the future.”
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It’s slightly unclear but presumably the idea is that companies and organisations looking to make better use of land will be able to piece together this data? It’s taken a long time – 20 years! – but maybe the Free Our Data campaign is starting to pay off, subliminally.
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We have learned nothing • Colossus
Jerry Neumann:
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around 1500, the Swiss physician Paracelsus noticed that Galenic [medical] treatments did not actually make patients better, and that some treatments—like mercury for syphilis—worked even though they made no sense within humoral theory. Paracelsus began to advocate listening to evidence rather than deferring to the authority of the long dead: “The patients are your textbook, the sickbed is your study.” In 1527, he even staged a public burning of Galen’s work. His vision took centuries to take hold—nearly 300 years later, George Washington died after an aggressive bloodletting—because people are more inclined to believe neat and simple stories like Galen’s than to confront messy and complex reality.
Paracelsus started with what worked and followed that to why. First-principles thinkers start with a hypothesized “why” and then insist it works, regardless of the results. Are our modern entrepreneurship thinkers more like Paracelsus, driven by evidence? Or more like Galen, sustained by the elegance of their own story? In the name of science, let’s look at the evidence.
Here is the official government data on U.S. startup survival.[3] Each line shows the survival likelihood of companies started in a given year. The first line tracks one-year survival, the second line two-year survival, and so on. What the chart shows is that between 1995 and the present, the percentage of companies surviving for one year is essentially unchanged. The same is true at two years, five years, and 10 years.
The New Pundits have been around long enough, and are widely known enough, that their relevant books have collectively sold millions of copies and are taught in virtually all university entrepreneurship courses.[4] If they worked, it would show up in the statistics. Instead, there has been zero systematic progress over the past 30 years in making startups more likely to survive.
…Success in a competitive market must be relative, which means what works must be different from what everyone else is doing.
The reductio ad absurdum makes this clear: if there were a flowchart that guaranteed a successful startup, people would churn out successful startups around the clock. It would be a perpetual money machine. But in a competitive environment, such a proliferation of new companies would cause most of them to fail. The premise that must be wrong is that such a flowchart can exist.
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Neumann argues that startups are in fact in a Red Queen’s race: everyone is running as fast as they can, so competitive advantage is short-lived, just like in competitive evolution.
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Android’s new sideloading rules are here, and they come with a 24-hour lock!
Adamya Sharma:
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When Google execs previously said sideloading would become a high-friction process on Android, they really weren’t kidding.
The company is finally sharing what Android’s new sideloading flow will look like in practice, and if you’re someone who installs apps outside the Play Store, you’re going to feel it immediately, and you’re going to feel it deeply.
This isn’t a subtle tweak or another warning screen you can quickly tap past. Google is fundamentally changing how sideloading works on Android, especially for apps that come from “unverified developers.”
Google’s brand-new “advanced flow” for sideloading is designed specifically for what the company calls power users. It’s a deliberately slow and almost impossible-to-rush-through process that will allow advanced Android users to sideload apps from unverified developers, while giving them plenty of caution to keep them safe from malicious apps and bad actors. At the same time, the new process is designed to protect unassuming Android users who might be tricked or coerced into downloading unverified apps.
When Android’s new sideloading rules come into force, installing apps from developers without Google verification (more on that later) will become extremely tedious by design and require a 24-hour lock before users can install them.
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This seems eminently reasonable, to be honest: the biggest problem with sideloading is the potential for people to be scammed. That potential still exists, because the apps can be scams, but at least it interposes something between the user and disaster.
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Stonehenge tunnel plan officially scrapped after £179m spent • LBC
Asher McShane:
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A development consent order (DCO) for a tunnel, two junctions and a northern bypass near the world heritage site has now formally been revoked by the Department for Transport (DfT).
The scheme was originally greenlit in 2023 but was put on hold in 2024 after £179.2m was spent – after it emerged costs were expected to reach £1.4bn.
Local Reform MP Danny Kruger has called the decision “scandalous”.
Council member Martin Smith said: “This is a huge blow for Wiltshire, our communities and the wider South West region. SWe are extremely disappointed that the government has decided to revoke the DCO for the A303 Stonehenge tunnel.”
The DfT cited “exceptional circumstances”. It said the decision had been made by transport secretary Heidi Alexander and that it “no longer aligns with current strategic policy objectives”.
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Those policy objectives are probably “not spending ridiculous amounts of money on projects which aren’t necessary”.
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The longevity scam •The Atlantic
Jordan D. Metzl:
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As a sports-medicine physician, I see the consequences of the modern longevity obsession up close. Patients arrive at my office convinced that the right peptides, cold plunges, or lab tests can meaningfully extend their lives. They’re almost certainly headed for disappointment—if not harm.
In many ways, the American people owe a debt of gratitude to the early champions of longevity medicine. Throughout the 20th century, Western physicians focused primarily on treating disease rather than preventing it. But over the past 15 years or so, a new generation of longevity-focused clinicians began emphasizing lifestyle changes such as sleep, exercise, and healthy diet as first-line strategies for disease prevention—not necessarily to extend life, but to improve health. More recently, private investment has poured into the field in pursuit of flashier claims about staving off death. Many longevity-focused clinics and influencers have drifted from prevention toward profit, selling an expanding menu of unvalidated treatments.
Some of the new advice is relatively harmless. Protein loading, for example, is unlikely to meaningfully extend one’s lifespan, but it is also unlikely to cause serious harm. Other trends are more concerning. I have seen patients experiment with drugs like rapamycin, an immunosuppressant medication prescribed for those who have undergone organ transplantation. Some health influencers claim, without convincing human-subject data to prove their point, that rapamycin slows cellular aging. Whether true or not, these claims have yet to be validated, but scientists do know that the side-effect profile of rapamycin includes an increased risk of infection and disease.
Other longevity enthusiasts are injecting or swallowing peptides, chains of amino acids that have been used in medicine for decades but are now becoming popular in their unregulated form. When prescribed by a physician, FDA-approved peptides such as insulin and GLP-1s can be remarkably effective. But no placebo-controlled human trials support the use of, say, “Wolverine” (scientific name BPC-157), a peptide that some influencers claim ramps up collagen production and aids tendon and ligament healing. Like many of the other non-FDA-approved peptides, anyone can order Wolverine online.
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The Wild West, now available in injectable or pill form. (Lots of people died of avoidable diseases in the Wild West.)
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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